Gunpoint Capitalism shows that the violent suppression of trade unions in the developing world is rife, as it has been in the West too, requiring serious solidarity work, finds Graham Kirkwood

On 11 September 2012, fire swept through a clothing factory in the city of Karachi in the south of Pakistan killing at least 289 people. Hours later, another fire in a shoe factory in the eastern city of Lahore killed 25 people. Such fires are not uncommon in Pakistan’s industrial areas which in Karachi alone employ around three million, 30% of Karachi’s working population (p.9). The Karachi fire however was the deadliest industrial fire ever recorded worldwide (p.3).

The fire took place in the Ali Enterprises factory located in the Sindh Industrial Trading Estate (SITE) in the Baldia town area of Karachi, the city’s oldest industrial area. Textile manufacturing took off in Karachi in the 1950s (p.11). Now a city of 25 million, Karachi was Pakistan’s capital until 1959. Ali Enterprises mainly produced jeans for German discount retailer KiK, a German Primark (p.3).

Factories in the SITE resembled concrete prisons. The fire alarm was faulty, almost all fire exits were blocked from the outside and windows barred or even bricked up with no functioning fire extinguishers despite a fire in the same building a few months earlier (p.275). Safety certificates at the factory were not worth the paper they were written on as the owners were experts at gaming the system, ‘prior to each audit, the factory was cleaned, and emergency kits hung up in all the buildings – only to be removed as soon as the visitors were gone’ (p.272).

A short circuit was the most likely explanation for the fire with the plant consuming 318KW of electricity instead of the permissible 210KW (pp.273-4). Ali Enterprises had never registered with the Labour Department and in any case, violations carried a maximum fine of $5US, an amount unchanged since 1934. Most of the workers were unregistered and precarious. There was no union, although a handful of workers were members of the Sindh Hosiery, Garment and General Workers Union.

On the night of the fire, rescue vehicles were blocked from the site by ‘gun-toting’ militia of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) as the MQM sought to control the rescue operation. Poor roads contributed to the disaster, exacerbated by traffic jams created by VIP movements (p.276). The owners, Abdul Aziz Bhaila and his two sons, Shahid and Arshad, were put on trial for murder.

The legal process following the fire uncovered a ‘vast network of collusion between Karachi’s employers, the city’s underworld, and its militarized political parties’ (p.7). Before too long however, the trial was redirected as new evidence emerged that the fire may have been arson and the work of local gangsters who had been demanding payments from the owners. The fire was designated a terrorist act and confessions were forthcoming. To cut a long story short, the Bhailas walked free.

Unions

Such ‘death trap’ factories are commonplace in Pakistan where safety measures for workers are non-existent with only 541 inspectors for over 100,000 factories in the country as a whole (p.275). In countries like the UK, unions are the final guarantor of safety at work. Gayer describes how the levels of state and private violence in Pakistan have meant activists have found it tremendously difficult to build unions.

In April 2021, Faiza, a seamstress at the Denim Clothing Company was beaten with a chain for simply demanding payment of her annual bonus (p.192). She recognised several of her attackers as recent recruits who continued to walk around the workshops unimpeded. The employment of such thugs was commonplace. Another employee, Arshad, tried to organise at the factory with his colleagues and to expose the managers who were drug trafficking. They found themselves reported to the police and had their national identity cards confiscated, only returned to them when they resigned their jobs.

Periods of some hope

The years 1972 and 1973 saw strikes at a level never seen before or since in Pakistan (p.68). In 1972 alone there were almost 800 disputes involving over 300,000 workers. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been sworn in as the country’s president on a wave of hope in December 1971 as head of a ‘socialist-inspired’ government. Workers mobilised in large numbers to force Bhutto to live up to his election promises only to be met with murderous repression by armed police.

Despite this, unions still had around 1.2 million members when Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup on 5 July 1977. There then followed a disastrous process where what was left of the trade unions split up into political party-affiliated organisations. In 2017, there were around 8,500 registered trade unions with a combined membership of just over 500,000 workers. Although unions exist in around 1,500 enterprises, there are four or five different unions in each plant. Total fragmentation has meant the unions that exist have been rendered powerless.

The second period of hope was what was called the lawyer’s movement which took place between 2007 and 2009 (pp.187-9).This ‘mobilisation of the legal profession left lasting traces within the judiciary’ meaning that, for a while at least, trade unionists brought up on spurious charges of terrorism, for example, were often acquitted. When damages were sought for the families of the Baldia fire victims (who were too intimidated to bring cases themselves), their cases were allowed despite this running contrary to Pakistani law (p.291).

Initially, in the trial following the Baldia fire, the judge Justice Alavi took a critical attitude towards the Karachi political class, despite hailing himself from Karachi’s old patrician elite and having a reputation for being pro-establishment (pp.276-8).

Not just Pakistan

Such levels of violence are not unique to Karachi or to Pakistan. ‘Specialists in violence’ have been active in times of crisis in the US and Europe during the 1930s or late 60s/early 70s for example (p.9). In more recent times, violence has been used to crush any attempt at union organisation in Latin America and the Philippines, with their own experience of armed neoliberalism (p.303). There are ‘family resemblances’ across the ages from the USA, France, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Algeria (p.195) and the subject of this book, Pakistan (p.303).

In the USA in the 1930s, much use was made of the Pinkerton detective agency to crush strikes (p.29). Violence was regularly used against the United Auto Workers union and the International Workers of The World. The IWW were subjected to violence and torture for a decade between 1909 and 1919 (p.30). At General Motors, there was a campaign of violence in 1937 and widespread use of vigilantes (p.32).

Much of the violence was used by Henry Ford as he shifted from a paternal approach to his employees, the carrot, to the stick. Ford employed a former naval sailor, amateur boxer and professional thug, Harry Bennett, as his industrial security officer for his factories in Detroit. By the end of the 1930s, the security apparatus at Ford, the Service Department, had more than 8,000 members, including several hundred ex-convicts and was at that time the world’s most powerful private police force operating in three main directions: social control, spying, and physical intimidation (pp.20-21).

Bennett kept up his links with naval intelligence and the military and was well integrated with the local and federal police, private detectives, journalists, and corporate interests as well as local Detroit gangsters (pp.40-41). For his troubles, Ford made sure Bennett was well rewarded. When finished, Bennett retired to California and took up art after burning all records of his involvement (p.44).

In France in the 1930s, organisers at the Renault factory were subjected to violence where the management employed a former white Russian, from the reactionary forces which fought against the Russian revolution (pp.35-6). Violence or threats of violence have also been used against organisers in Germany (p.33) and in the UK (p.34).

What can we do to help?

Those trying to organise under such severe repression need the support and practical solidarity of trade unionists in countries where we are not subjected to such brutality, at least not routinely. Many UK unions have resources set aside for international work, which in the case of my own union, UCU, has involved supporting workers organising in Colombia in particular. These endeavours are important.

A more direct concern highlighted in this book is the use of anti-terrorism legislation against trade unions. In Pakistan, this has become a feature of the state organising against workers using the law to penalise workers for disruption resulting from strikes (p.185, p.189). In 2010, 35 trade unionists were charged with terrorism for organising a strike in Pakistan. Such anti-terrorism legislation has also been used against workers organising in Colombia also (p.195).

Conclusion

This book is largely an academic text based on years of research. There is a wealth of detail on the structures and personnel involved in the repressive apparatus used in the factories to prevent workers from organising. Fieldwork for the book was carried out from 2015 to 2022 over seven non-consecutive months in Karachi supplemented with archival trips to the US and UK. Around 160 interviews were conducted with workers and trade unionists as well as managers, lawyers and private security personnel (p.10). It is well written and accessible and would be of interest particularly to trade unionists who have an interest in how workers organise in particularly harsh circumstances. There are valuable lessons for all of us in how trade-union organising in Pakistan was derailed, not just by extreme levels of violence, but also by directing union organisation down political party lines, causing fragmentation in the workers movement, thus making it largely ineffective.

As someone not familiar with the history of the movements in Pakistan, it would have been interesting to know more about the period when Imran Khan was prime minister between 2018 and 2022 and whether this was any help at all to those organising on the ground. Khan is only mentioned in passing once or twice in the book and not in the index which could have been improved to make it easier to locate items.

Eight months after the Baldia fire, in April 2013, the eight-story Rana Plaza commercial building in Bangladesh collapsed killing 1,134 people with around 2,500 injured. This was the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history. The issues raised in this book, as illustrated by the author, are not unique to Pakistan and the need for unions to ensure basic levels of safety at work affect workers across the world, particularly in the developing world. For those of us in the more developed parts of the world where we do have some workplace rights, we need to do anything we can to assist our sisters and brothers organising under the most extreme circumstances.